Corporate Mobile Banking Slowly Gaining Traction

Though adoption has been slower than on the consumer side, the growth potential is still there.

Despite the exploding growth of mobile banking among consumers, mobile banking for corporate customers has seen a more cautious adoption.

While most, if not all, corporate treasurers use their own personal mobile devices, incorporating that same functionality for use in their work lives has proven a bit difficult. I recently spoke with Patricia McGinnis, director of the commercial and enterprise payments solution at Mercator Advisory Group, who authored a report on this very topic, and discussed the ways in which mobile banking is catching on slowly among corporate customers.

According to McGinnis, corporate mobile banking faces a two-fold challenge: on the one hand, corporate IT departments are still figuring out BYOD policies and how to best secure mobile devices that are used for company purposes. While many corporate treasurers can do things like receive alerts and approve payments on a mobile device, functions like performing administrative duties and initiating payments are still being debated.

Secondly, says McGinnis, banks are still facing challenges in figuring out how to best serve corporate customers in this way while maintaining strict security.

"The company is leery of breaches that can occur via a mobile device, and the bank doesn't necessarily want unlimited access to corporate accounts on mobile devices," she says. This is especially true since cyber criminals are increasingly targeting corporate accounts, and banks fear ultimately being held responsible for breaches, she notes.

"I would say everybody is moving a little more cautiously in the corporate than in the consumer space because there is larger amounts of money moving, and the technology is evolving so fast," McGinnis says.

For more on the current state and future of corporate mobile banking, be sure to check out the cover story in our upcoming February digital issue.

Bryan Yurcan is associate editor for Bank Systems and Technology. He has worked in various editorial capacities for newspapers and magazines for the past 8 years. After beginning his career as a municipal and courts reporter for daily newspapers in upstate New York, Bryan has ... View Full Bio

It seems that there still needs to be a change in mentality - in addition to even stronger security - for corporate IT departments to feel ready to fully enable mobile access. It's a bit like cloud computing: in some cases, firms still erroneously think it's less secure than physical data centers for example, although that is finally changing as more firms start moving mission-critical applications to the cloud.